Who wants to play D&D online again?

What if I’ve never played a pencils and paper RPG before?  Can I still be interested in possibly playing D&D?

Peeps, don't worry about the no experience part, we all started somewhere. I think we've all played video game RPGs so we all get the general concept of stats and skills at least. That's better than the offline group I play with when we started. I will hold your hand and whisper gentle encouragement into your ear if you need help with playing.

So let me get the potential players right. So far it's the following: Baron von Costume Roy Batty's Pet Dove Nudeviking Murray the Demonic Skull Crash Test Dumbass

Can you all just sound off on what time zones you're in so I can suggest possible game times? No need to create characters yet if scheduling is impossible.

I'm just trying to find when people would normally be okay for. Knowing time zones would help in suggesting times hopefully acceptable to all. We would still confirm actual dates and times later. I would create a campaign in Roll20 and send everyone the link, then at the appointed hour we would all connect to the Roll20 campaign and play until we have so much fun we cream our pants. Then repeat for the next session.

Also I am Eastern Daylight Time as well.

yeah we had some serious voice chat issues last time, didn't we end up using skype at one point?

Would I be correct in assuming this site takes care of dice rolls and stat sheets such that we don't need to go out procuring 4-, 8-, 20-, and 100-sided dice and other typical D&D/Pathfinder accouterments?

sarapen, I'm also EST in an area that observes Daylight Savings time.

Okay, so as players, none of you actually need any books at all. You just need to create characters, which I can help you with, but after that then you just need to show up for game time.

However, if you insist on knowing the ins and outs of the game beforehand then the Pathfinder rule books are online at legacy.aonprd.com (though this website is not being updated anymore and the official rules are at a different site that is currently a work in progress). I would suggest just giving the Core Rulebook a quick skim, especially since large parts of it are for Game Masters so it wouldn't apply to players. There are a fiendish number of rules to get lost in if that's your thing. I can also point you all to further resources if you want.

There's also a free handout explaining what to expect for the campaign, what classes the campaign writers think would work well, and that kind of thing. Like half of it is about the campaign setting, which basically means a bunch of gibberish fantasy names and made-up history, but it can help with thinking up characters. I'll send a copy to everyone. Don't worry too much about the stats and whatnot in the handout at this point, though.

Regarding voice chat, I think I remember resorting to Skype, so maybe we should just start off on Discord from the get-go. Roll20's core business isn't voice chat so it's no surprise that others can do it better.

And yes, Roll20 has the character sheets directly in the game. Actually now you can even create your character directly from the sheet, though only with the standard races and classes. I've created the campaign page in Roll20 which you can access here: app.roll20.net/join/4565278/6iv3yg

You'll need to create a free Roll20 account, but after that just select Launch Game. At the bottom of the page you should see some generic tokens I placed. The stuff on the right is fairly intuitive - Chat, Compendium, etc. The Journal tab shows the different characters I've created, and if you click on them and select the Charactermancer the sheet will help you create a new character, but only for the standard races and classes. Again, I can also help you all with character creation but you can at least get the hang of clicking around the space. Right now anyone can edit the character sheets but after everyone has an account I can lock each character to a specific player. Also I created a character named Horsey if you want to see how a completed sheet looks.

Anyway, so far 4 of us are on Eastern time and 1 on Korean Standard time.

Okay, so per Eastern time, France is 6 hours ahead while South Korea is 13 hours ahead. This is tricky.

Err, would we all be able to generally do Saturdays at 9 am Eastern, 3 pm in France and 10 pm in South Korea? I can do it since I normally get up early even on weekends, but I realize some of us like to sleep in.

I'm not suggesting a specific Saturday yet since I still need to read through the module, plus character creation for you guys. But is this doable for a game time?

It's probably better if I bow out actually. I have the most problematic time zone and my schedule means I have to travel sundays often anyway. I demand a written weekly recap though

Okay, so most of us are almost in the same time zone. I wish we could all stick together but I'm going to accept Murray the Demonic Skull 's resignation due to his rampant Frenchiness. Sorry dude, I know you wanted to play in the last one too. We might be able to do a one shot adventure or something like that later though.

But this does open up more space for scheduling. We could play on Saturday nights for us, which are Sunday mornings in Nudeviking time. 8 pm Central is 9 pm Eastern on a Saturday and 10 am Sunday in South Korea. Can this work for everyone?

Remember that we would only be doing this like every 2-3 weeks so it's not like we would need to keep our weekends open all the time.

Another option is to schedule the games on Friday nights which would be Saturday mornings in Korea, also 9-ish Eastern, 8 Central, 10 am in Seoul. I would prefer Saturday nights since I'm not sure how peppy I'll be feeling after a long Friday at work but can give it a go if this is the better time for everyone else.

Friday or Saturday nights would both work for me!

Saturday would be better here. Between football games in summer and curling in Winter I'm rarely around friday nights, though it only becomes an every week thing once curling starts.

Saturday nights EST work for me!

Sorry I haven't finished writing my explainer on character creation in Pathfinder. I normally work on RPG stuff when I'm slacking off at work but it's been rather busy this week. The Beginner Box thing I sent everyone should help if you're impatient.

Anyway, in theory character creation is straightforward: you pick what race and class and alignment (more on this later) you want to play, you decide on your stats (either by rolling dice or distributing a set number of points), then you choose what special abilities you want your character to have.

There are two things that can trip you up, though. The first is that you get paralyzed trying to decide from a very large set of options. This is only a problem if you're creating a character right there at the game table, though, since you can take all the time you want if you're doing the character creation by yourself.

The second issue that can arise is the fact that each choice can impact your other choices: some races can't play certain classes, certain special abilities can only be used by certain combinations of race and class and alignment, and so many bonuses and disadvantages accrue for various combinations that it's hard to keep straight what's going on.

So yeah, it can get confusing. Now, you can obsess over stacking your bonuses and minimizing your demerits (a.k.a. min-maxing your stats) but I say just make a character you think looks fun and roll with it.

But where do you start? For now I'm just going to cover what I consider the hard part of character creation - coming up with an idea - and I'll get to the actual mechanical aspects of how to pick stats at a later point.

1) You can certainly approach character creation like a questionnaire - pick race, pick class, pick alignment, pick feats, etc.

2) Or you can just jump directly to how you want to play. Do you want to fling spells around? Maybe crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women? This will help you decide your class, and from then you can just fill in the blanks on race and so on. This is probably the easiest way to create a character. The standard classes are the following:


This is what the campaign's Player Guide says about classes:

There are also sub-classes and variants. The Player Guide gives a list of what special classes the campaign writers think might work well. I will note that "vigilante" is a class, and yes, that means you can essentially play as Batman (a variant of this class is Magical Child, where instead of changing costumes you undergo a magical transformation into essentially Sailor Moon).

3) However, I like to role play a bunch, which is to say that I enjoy the shared narrative the players as a group create, which means focusing on my character as a character. This leads to another way to create a character, which is by thinking of an interesting narrative hook. I for real like to use this website for ideas:

www.whothefuckismydndcharacter.com

It's not the only or even my main source of ideas for characters I want to play but it helps knock a few ideas loose from my head. For example:

Hmm, half-orc bard? Now that's an original combination. It took me like 10 tries before I got something that interested me, so this random character seed generator isn't exactly rocket science.

But this is only one tool, and remember that we're playing through a specific scenario and some characters may work better than others. Specifically, the Player's Guide says this:

4) This leads us to another way to create a character, which is by focusing on their motives. Don't worry, you don't need to write a novel about your character's difficult childhood or whatnot, though you can if you want. It's fine just to have a single sentence - my character is a mafia liaison with the local senator, my character is a wealthy gadabout who disguises himself as a bat to punish evildoers, etc. Then you proceed from this starting point and decide the rest of your character's back ground. Tor example with regard to race, is your character secretly a half-elf and is dressing in costume to protect other half-elves from pogroms?

5) Finally, the Player Guide itself lists what are called Campaign Traits, which are specific character backgrounds you can select which give minor game advantages to your character. They might also help you in thinking up a character. For instance, here's Disgraced Noble:

Anyway, those are the main methods I use for coming up with ideas for characters. We can get into the nitty gritty of stats in a later installment.

Okay, so I mentioned there are some extra classes open to you in the Ultimate Intrigue rulebook. I just shared the info in the Google drive folder I set up but I'll also outline it here, since I can't find it at any of the free places online. Don't bother reading the second half of the book since it's just rules and advice for GMs on how to run games with a heavy focus on intrigue.

The book is mostly about tweaking existing classes to make them better at intrigue. For example, there's a regular class called the alchemist but this book gives the rules on how to make the alchemist sub-class (known as an archetype) into an interrogator, who can make special injections and serums for use against other characters. I think almost all of the classes listed in the book would work in the campaign.

This book also introduces a new class known as the vigilante, whose biggest thing is having a Dual Identity. You can find the mechanical details for which are here: www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/vigilante

Incidentally, after skimming the vigilante stuff more closely, it looks like it gives you options for playing as the Hulk, Batman, Spider-Man, or Sailor Moon.

Anyway, that covers the classes that are available for you to pick.

For races you have the standard panoply: dwarves, elves, humans, and half-elves, plus halflings (i.e., hobbits but we don't call them that because of copyright issues), half-orcs, and gnomes. Please let's stay out of the Advanced Race Guide, so no aquatic gillmen or catfolk or goblins.

And fear not, I'll go through an example of how to actually create a character.